Religion Publishing

tials mattered,” Ingrum says. “Now that is much less the case.

Life matters, voice matters, self-revelation matters.”That emphasis on the experiential means a lot of books look-ing at how the author attempts to right social ills through thelens of faith. This season, a number of them center on orphanedand poor children. Andrea Doering, executive editor at Baker’sRevell imprint, which in April will publish Hope Runs: AnAmerican Tourist, a Kenyan Boy, a Journey of Redemption by ClaireDiaz-Ortiz and Samuel Ikua Gachagua, says these titles appealto younger readers of faith because social justice issues are lessdivisive than culture war flashpoints like sexuality and abortion.

“No one is going to tell you they are for poverty or slavery,”
she says. “Speaking out on those issues gives Christians a way
to connect with the needs of the world. It is a sense of being for
something, rather than being identified by what you don’t do”
or don’t approve of. Other books with a personal point of view
include Stolen: The True Story of a Sex Trafficking Survivor by
Katariina Rosenblatt and Cecil Murphey (Revell, Oct.), Philip
Cameron’s memoir of his work with orphans in They Call Me
Dad: How God Uses the Unlikely to Save the Discarded (Higher Life,
Apr.); and Rich in Love: When God Rescues Messy People by Irene
Garcia with Lissa Halls Johnson (David C. Cook, Feb.), about
Garcia’s family of 32 children.

Homosexuality is still a hot topic,but where authors of earlier gen-erations focused on morality, thisgeneration focuses on spiritual-ity. “One trend we are seeing ispublishing for those who havebeen harmed by or left out byreligion,” says David Maxwell,Knox Press, citing The Bible’s Yes to Same-Sex Marriage: An Evangelical’s Change of Heart by Mark Achtemei-er (June). “Another trend is publishing for seekers who may nothave grown up in the church and come from a more sociallyliberal perspective,” he adds. Some of those seekers who iden-tify as evangelical are looking to mainline Christian and evengeneral interest publishers, “perhaps because traditional Chris-tian publishers are not comfortable with some of the positions[these authors] would like to take in their writing. WestminsterJohn Knox is beginning to attract someof them to our program.” Baker’s BrazosPress imprint tackles homosexuality inGenerous Spaciousness: Responding to Gaysin the Church by Wendy Vander Wal-Gritter (May). From the indie press Sky-horse Publishing comes The ReappearingAct: Coming Out as Gay on a College Bas-ketball Team Led by Born-Again Christiansby Kate Fagan (May); WaterBrook’snew Convergent line has God & the GayChristian by Matthew Vines (May).

Millennials of faith are more inter-ested in poverty, immigration, and theenvironment than their forebears, andtitles are beginning to reflect that.These subjects, says David Zimmer-man, associate editor at InterVarsityPress, “are not controversial comparedto abortion and divorce, especially for ageneration that’s grown up recyclingand with conspicuous immigrant popu-lations in their schools.”Such topics are a particular emphasisfor IVP, which is publishing Faith-Root-ed Organizing: Mobilizing the Church inService to the World by Alexia Salvatierraand Peter Heltzel (Feb.); Broke: WhatFinancial Desperation Revealed About God’sAbundance by Caryn Rivadeneira (Apr.);Let Creation Rejoice: Hope & Ecological Cri-sis by Robert S. White (June); and Im-migration: Tough Questions, Direct Answers

by Dale Hanson Bourke (July). Zimmer-man also sees a turning away from easyanswers for social ills and a move towardpractical ways of coping with them. “Wedon’t want our faith to land on top ofcultural issues and stamp them into sub-mission,” he says. “We want our faith tocommingle with the era we live in, tohelp us make sense of it, to help us make it better.”Evangelical Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, now a partof HarperCollins Christian Publishing, has long offered titles